Political scientist and media critic

May 31, 2005

Martha Burk notes the apparent influence of George Lakoff on Howard Dean's language during last week's "Meet the Press." But she doesn't discuss my favorite part -- Dean's unintentionally revealing slip:

Absolutely. I'm not advocating we change our position. I believe that a woman has a right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she gets, and I think Democrats believe that in general. Here's the problem--and we were outmanipulated by the Republicans; there's no question about it. We have been forced into the idea of "We're going to defend abortion." I don't know anybody who thinks abortion is a good thing. I don't know anybody in either party who is pro-abortion.

Lakoff-style framing is not a solution to the Democrats' problems (see here and here), but it especially doesn't work when you admit that you're trying to manipulate people. It sounds like a NPR game show: "Wait, wait, don't outmanipulate me!"

Two days after winning reelection last fall, President Bush declared that he had earned plenty of "political capital, and now I intend to spend it." Six months later, according to Republicans and Democrats alike, his bank account has been significantly drained.

In the past week alone, the Republican-led House defied his veto threat and passed legislation promoting stem cell research; Senate Democrats blocked confirmation, at least temporarily, of his choice for U.N. ambassador; and a rump group of GOP senators abandoned the president in his battle to win floor votes for all of his judicial nominees.

With his approval ratings in public opinion polls at the lowest level of his presidency, Bush has been stymied so far in his campaign to restructure Social Security. On the international front, violence has surged again in Iraq in recent weeks, dispelling much of the optimism generated by the purple-stained-finger elections back in January, while allies such as Egypt and Uzbekistan have complicated his campaign to spread democracy.

After Daniel Okrent, former public editor of the New York Times, took a substance-free cheap shot at Paul Krugman in his final column, Krugman fired back with a letter denouncing Okrent. Now they're battling it out on the new public editor's website. Not sure I have the time or desire to wade through all the he said/he said on this one, but I'll keep an eye on it.

This blog gets results! I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago noting the apparent conflict of interest in LA Times columnist Ron Brownstein writing an article touting John McCain's chances as a third-party presidential candidate in 2008 shortly before marrying McCain's communication director. The post, which was linked on the media insider site Romenesko, appears to have prompted a disclosure statement that appeared at the end of Brownstein's column yesterday:

(Full disclosure: My wife recently took a job as an aide to Sen. John McCain [R-Ariz.], one of the judicial deal's architects. Marriages that span the divide between the media and politics are common in Washington. They require both parties to draw a firm line between their personal attachments and professional responsibilities. I do not intend to treat McCain any differently as a result of my marriage, and my wife does not expect favored treatment for her boss. I certainly don't expect any special treatment from McCain or his aides. Readers, of course, will have to make their own judgments, but I am confident that her new job will not affect my judgments, pro and con, about McCain and his initiatives.)

Although focused principally on her Senate reelection campaign next year, her advisers are informally -- and in some cases not so informally -- planning for a White House run.

A presidential campaign, Clinton's advisers acknowledge, would raise anew many of the old questions -- about her marriage, her motives, and her balance of pragmatism and principle -- that she successfully answered in her 2000 race in New York. She is the most popular politician in the state, even in many traditionally Republican areas upstate.

As her advisers see it, Clinton's Empire State campaign and her five years in the Senate are a potent rejoinder to a refrain commonly heard among Democrats anxious about a potential candidacy. As the skeptics see it, she could probably win a nomination by exciting Democratic partisans, but she remains too personally and ideologically polarizing a figure to win a general election. Some members of her team, discussing strategy on the condition that they not be identified by name, acknowledge that answering this skepticism is among her biggest challenges in the next two years...

The strategy, confidants say, has three elements. On social issues, it is to reassure moderate and conservative voters with such positions as her support of the death penalty, and to find rhetorical formulations on abortion and other issues -- on which her position is more liberal -- that she is nonetheless in sympathy with traditional values. On national security, it is to ensure that she has no votes or wavering statements that would give the GOP an opening to argue that she is not in favor of a full victory in Iraq. In her political positioning generally, it is to find occasions to prominently work across party lines -- to argue that she stands for pragmatism over the partisanship that many centrist voters especially dislike about Washington.

Behold this passage above -- it's a perfect summary of all the tropes claiming that Hillary can win. Let's run through them:

1) Americans will learn about the "true Hillary" and change their minds about her like New Yorkers have, even though she remains wildly polarizing and controversial outside the coasts.

3) She can paper over her liberal positions with "rhetorical formulations" showing that "she is nonetheless in sympathy with traditional values."

Also, we finally get a definitive answer to a question I first raised when trying to figure out why she is running for the Senate in 2006. As I noted, she will be under intense pressure to make a pledge not to run for president, both from New Yorkers (who support a pledge) and the press. But apparently her camp thinks she can get away without making one:

Privately, her advisers say she may not have decided to run but she has definitely decided she wants to do everything necessary to keep her options open and allow her to launch a campaign if she decides to after 2006. Her out-of-state travel is increasingly strategic, including trips to swing states such as Ohio.

In 2000, she repeatedly pledged that she would finish her term without seeking the presidency. Aides say she will not issue such a pledge this time.

There's another factor to consider: the press. Bill and Hillary (and Al Gore) were savaged by the press; there's no reason to think Hillary will get off any easier this time around. In fact, it will be easy for the press and partisans to paste together some out-of-context anecdotes and quotations to bring the old Hillary back to life -- and then she's in trouble.

In particular, as I wrote, the press can use the pledge issue to reconstruct Hillary circa 1993-1994 and to frame her as dishonest:

[E]ven if she gets away without making a pledge, two years of slippery rhetoric and question-dodging will reinforce the meta-narrative that she is a dishonest, opportunistic politician like her husband, particularly as the media picks up on the parallels to him breaking his pledge to serve out his final term as governor of Arkansas. And if that meta-narrative shapes media coverage in 2007-2008, she has no chance in the general election.

(It's important to note that almost any Democrat could win in 2008 if the economy is in bad enough shape. But Hillary goes in with considerable disadvantages relative to almost any other potential nominee besides John Kerry.)

Nooooo -- it's back! Following in Ron Brownstein's footsteps, Mickey Kaus has revived the silly claim that John McCain has a real chance as a third party nominee in 2008:

WSJ's Brendan Miniter argues that Republicans shouldn't move to the center by embracing McCain and McCainism, because "[c]onservatives can and do win elections for the Republican Party." That may be true. The problem is that McCain doesn't have to run as a Republican. He can run as a third-party candidate, Perot-style. Isn't it, in fact, intuitively obvious that that's what McCain will do, once he's sufficiently infuriated by his rejection by GOP conservatives? ... And he might win. Polls show voters are dissatisfied with both parties, no? Ross Perot got 19 percent of the vote despite being labeled (unfairly or not) as wacky. That's a good base to start with. ... McCain would steal both moderate GOPs and moderate Dems. Suddenly the Republicans would too have to worry about the center, in a way they maybe wouldn't if they were just running against a Democrat. ... 3:39 A.M.

In fact, it's not "intuitively obvious" at all. A McCain candidacy would doom his career as a Republican in the Senate and cause him to be defeated in the next GOP primary in Arizona. And, as I wrote before, there's no reason to think that a third-party candidate could win the presidency absent extraordinary circumstances:

[W]e have this little thing in political science called Duverger's Law. As the introductory political science text I teach to freshman puts it, "In any election where a single winner is chosen by plurality vote (whoever gets the most votes wins), there is a strong tendency for serious competitors to be reduced to two because people tend to vote strategically." Why would we expect a third-party challenge to overcome this dynamic? The two parties have vast advantages in financial resources, mobilization, and voter loyalty. To convince people you could win, you'd have to create an inordinate amount of momentum. And to do so, you'd have to have a constituency that supported you -- the Internet is not an ideology or a voting bloc...

In addition, as Brownstein points out, winning the electoral college would be difficult to impossible -- "the strongest [third-party] candidate could still face the syndrome of finishing second almost everywhere, trailing Republicans in the red states and Democrats in the blue. To have any chance, an independent would need to nearly run the table in battleground states — like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that don't tilt decisively to either side."

Even though third party candidacies are wildly unrealistic, Kaus, Brownstein, Joe Trippi and others keep touting them because they make great copy. So what if they'll never succeed?

May 30, 2005

I've given Factcheck.org a hardtime lately, so I wanted to link to a new piece that does a good job debunking a bad statistic I had assumed was correct. Here's the summary:

Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took office in 2001.

This claim is false. It's based on an an opinion piece that used data from only 16 states. A study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of 43 states found that abortions have actually decreased.

The story of how the claim started is ridiculous -- some ethics professor just calculated a bogus statistic and put it in a relatively obscure op-ed, and pretty soon top Democratic politicians were repeating it as fact. It reminds me of some of our all-time great myths on Spinsanity -- the NEA and 9/11, Ken Lay and the Lincoln Bedroom, and Bush and the Taliban, all of which started with one misinformed or misleading source and then exploded. And the worst part is that once a compelling myth is in the media bloodstream it's almost impossible to stamp out for good.

E.J. Dionne gets it right about the deep ambivalence of the conservative movement toward truth and factual accuracy, which are selectively invoked as absolute standards for the media when it's strategically useful but completely set aside when it comes to claims from the White House:

Conservative academics have long attacked "postmodernist" philosophies for questioning whether "truth" exists at all and claiming that what we take as "truths" are merely "narratives" woven around some ideological predisposition. Today's conservative activists have become the new postmodernists. They shift attention away from the truth or falsity of specific facts and allegations -- and move the discussion to the motives of the journalists and media organizations putting them forward. Just a modest number of failures can be used to discredit an entire enterprise.

The Media Research Center is the perfect illustration of what happens when you start treating the truth as relative. For instance, it recently published a study that Media Matters points out defines "[a]ny news story not dominated by unadulterated Republican spin [as], by definition, a case of 'liberal bias.'" Or consider Josh Marshall's analysis of how the Bush administration seems to believe that its disagreements with experts who hold contradictory views are simply reflections of differing ideology:

If you're a revisionist -- someone pushing for radically changing the status quo -- you're apt to see "the experts" not just as people who may be standing in your way, but whose minds have been corrupted by a wrongheaded ideology whose arguments can therefore be ignored. To many in the Bush administration, 'the experts' look like so many liberals wedded to a philosophy of big government, the welfare state, over-regulation and a pussyfooting role for the nation abroad. The Pentagon civil servant quoted above told me that the standard response to warnings from the Joint Staff about potential difficulties was simply to say: "That's just the Joint Staff being obstructionist." Even if the experts are right in the particulars--the size of the deficit, the number of troops needed in Iraq--their real goal is to get in the way of necessary changes that have to be made.

In that simple, totalizing assumption we find the kernel of almost every problem the administration has faced over recent months--and a foretaste of the troubles the nation may confront in coming years. By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration's hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration's take on economic policy, environmental policy, and in almost every sort of policy question involving science. Muzzling the experts helped the White House muscle its revisionist plans through. But in numerous cases it prevented them from implementing even their own plans effectively.

Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn't just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is...well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because "the facts" aren't really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don't agree with you, they're just the other side's argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that's all the facts are, it's really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.

And of course there's the famous passage from Ron Suskind's New York Times Magazine article on the Bush administration:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

The worst part is that the liberal vanguard is following movement conservatives down the rabbit hole. It's a rapidly shrinking "reality-based community" out here in, um, reality. Send reinforcements!

You would think that the last thing college-bound students need is training in narrow-minded thinking. But according to a perceptive article by Ann Hulbert in the New York Times Magazine, that's exactly what the new SAT persuasive essay is doing -- with potentially disastrous effects for kids who have grown up watching partisan foodfights on TV:

The real problem with the SAT persuasive essay assignment isn't what it conveys about spontaneity or style but what it suggests about how to argue. Students are asked to ponder (quickly) a short excerpt of conventional wisdom about, say, the advisability of following rules, and they are then instructed to ''develop your point of view on this issue.'' But if the goal of ''better writing'' is ''improved thinking,'' as the College Board's National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges has pronounced, perhaps it's worth asking whether practice in reflexively taking a position on any potentially polarizing issue is what aspiring college students -- or the rest of us -- need most.

As those sample essay questions at the start reveal, and as any test-prep book will confirm, at the homiletic heart of the SAT writing assignment is the false dichotomy. The best strategy for a successful essay is to buy into one of the facile premises that inform the question, and then try to sell it as if it were really yours. Essayists won't be penalized for including false information, either, according to the official guide for graders. ''You are scoring the writing,'' it instructs, ''and not the correctness of facts.''

False analogies, of course, were an old SAT staple, but at least test takers got credit for picking only the true one. By contrast, the test-prep industry bluntly says that a blinkered perspective pays off on the essay -- and nobody knows better than the professional SAT obsessives. ''It is very important that you take a firm stance in your essay and stick to it,'' insists Kaplan's ''New SAT.'' Practicing what it preaches, the prep book doesn't let go. ''You are not fair and balanced! (Well, you should be fair, but definitely not balanced.)'' Kaplan drives home the point yet again, just in case. ''What's important is that you take a position and state how you feel. It is not important what other people might think, just what you think.''

This doesn't bear much resemblance to an exercise in critical reasoning, which usually involves clarifying the logic of a position by taking counterarguments seriously or considering alternative assumptions. The English teachers may worry that in the rush to prepare for the SAT expository essay, personal writing will get short shrift in schools. In fact, self-centered opinion is exactly what the questions solicit. ''Don't panic and write from the opposing point of view'' is Kaplan's calming advice.

You have to hand it to the College Board: the new essay seems all too apt as training for contemporary social and political discourse in this country, and for journalistic food fights too. But don't colleges want to encourage the ''strengths of analysis and logic'' that the Board itself has said are so important to ''the citizenry in a democracy''? Out in the ever more competitive world, it is hard to communicate if the only side of an argument you can hear is your own.

May 26, 2005

It was humorous to see how quickly Newsweek lost its cachet with
Middle America. So long as it went about its usual revolting Neanderthal literary mission -- wrapping
4000 words of inane speculations about the historical Jesus around breathless updates on the value
of Martha Stewart stock (Pie Chart, p. 37!), and startling new insights about "the real George Washington" -- no
one had any problem with Newsweek.

An ethical magazine is one that uses up its news pages asking questions
like Can smiling prevent cancer? and makes sure at least twice each calendar year to do a
"What the fuck is wrong with our ungrateful, disobedient children?" story, so that angry suburban
parents have something to read in the doctor's office while they wait to have their bunions shaved.
That -- plus the occasional feature on Shrek 2 as the crowning achievement of the human
creative impulse, and the odd investigation into why cell phones in restaurants are so darn annoying -- is
what good journalism is all about.

You are dead wrong (as well as sloppy and lazy) in your portrayal of Okrent and Mankiw's statements about Paul Krugman. (For the record, I know both Paul and Greg, although not well.)

The Okrent case is the more egregious: he says that Krugman "slices and dices" data to support his point of view, without offering an example. I'm an economist myself, and know the macro data very well. I can't think of single example to support Okrent's statement. (Paul has published corrections regarding a couple of minor, and non-substantive, points.) Most conservative attacks on his arguments involve innumeracy or sheer ignorance of basic facts or basic principles of economics; many involve willful misrepresentation.

Now consider Greg's statement (and I'm paraphrasing) that "Paul seems to think that everyone who disagrees with him is either fool or a liar." To begin with, I'll stick to economics. The plain fact is that the Bush Administration has been consistently and deliberately mendacious in its public portrayal of its economic policies. (This characterization, by the way, is the overwhelming consensus in the professional economics world, which includes many conservatives.) Capable policy apointees (like Greg or Glen Hubbard) have had no meaningful input in this Administration; nor has the professional staff at places like Treasury or CEA. All economic policy involves politics. But the politicization of the policy making process in this Administration is without precedent in my professional life.

Paul would have been called a moderate or even conservative Democrat prior to this Administration. (Read his classical essay, "In Praise of Cheap Labor," if you're under the illusion that he's some sort of leftist.) So would I. Paul appears strident only because he's had the bad manners to say that people are lying when they're obviously lying. (A prominent case in point: many of the President's public statements about the finances of the social security system have been plain, simple untruths.) And what's maddening to Paul, and to me, is that there's no core of conservative principle in this Administration. A conservative devotion to free markets has been displaced by reckless spending, reckless tax cuts, crony capitalism and special interest give-aways. What "balanced" take on these issues should Paul offer?

More generally, you should know better. Remember, I've confined myself so far to economic policy. Do you want to defend the honesty and integrity of this Administration on, say, abuse of detainees?"

Indeed. But see also Spinsanity on Krugman and Jon Henke's comment below my original post, which notes several allegations of dishonesty against Krugman (the first two are rather semantic, but the third seems to have merit).

It's old news that Amnesty International is a highly politicized pressure group, but these latest accusations amount to pro-al Qaeda propaganda. A "human rights" group that can't distinguish between Stalin's death camps and detention centers for terrorists who kill civilians can't be taken seriously.

Now, I'm not going to endorse Amnesty's language; certainly there's an important distinction between the Soviet gulag and Guantanamo. But that doesn't make the group's charges "pro-al Qaeda." This is part of a long and disreputable pattern of labeling dissent as "pro-Saddam," "pro-terrorist," etc. since 9/11. It has got to stop.

Three crosses were burned in separate locations in Durham late Wednesday evening, Durham Police Department officers reported. Ku Klux Klan fliers were also found at one location, police told The Associated Press.

"It is too early into [the investigation] to tell if it is actually directed at one person or one group," Cates said. "We just have to wait and see."

According to a DPD press release, the first incident was reported at 9:19 p.m. near St. Luke's Episcopal Church at 1737 Hillandale Road. Officers and firefighters responded to a second call a half-hour later near the intersection of South Roxboro Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. Officials found a cross burning on a hill near a construction site. A third cross was reported in a field near Holloway and Dillard Streets at 10:28 p.m. No injuries were reported.

And on an even darker note, Newsmax reports on a disturbing Bill O'Reilly "fantasy" (their word) about the decapitation of Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley:

It all started with a [Los Angeles] Times editorial urging the shutdown of the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and access to attorneys for detainees.

That set off O'Reilly. During the broadcast of "The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly" on May 17, he declared:

"How can they think this way? How can anyone think this way? You know, 'Shutting down Guantanamo and giving suspected terrorists legal protections would help restore our reputation abroad.'"

Said O'Reilly: "That's like saying, 'Well, if we're nicer to the people who want to kill us, then the other people who want to kill us will like us more.'"

Then he fired off the big gun, saying the paper's editorial board will "never get it until they (the terrorists) grab Michael Kinsley out of his little house and they cut his head off. And maybe when the blade sinks in, he'll go, 'Perhaps O'Reilly was right.'"

The Times counterattacked in a May 24 editorial. Questioning why people the U.S. has liberated from tyranny "don't love us," the paper stated: "It doesn't seem worthy of decapitation to suggest that ghastly stories (not all fabricated by Newsweek) about abuse of prisoners don't help."

...For the moment, O'Reilly is in the liberal paper's crosshairs, warning: "O'Reilly should be careful. Any further decapitation fantasies could get him in serious trouble with the Secret Service."

It seems the paper has difficulty distinguishing between a threat and a "fantasy." And when it comes to actual threats against its employees, the paper may want to check with its lawyers on whom to contact.

The Secret Service deals with threats against the President and Vice President, not editorial writers.

This is the Coulter-ization of political discourse. It's not normal -- or acceptable -- to "joke" about the murder of your political opponents. When will we cast these people out of public life?

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults. Maureen Dowd was still writing that Alberto R. Gonzales "called the Geneva Conventions 'quaint' " nearly two months after a correction in the news pages noted that Gonzales had specifically applied the term to Geneva provisions about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.

No one deserves the personal vituperation that regularly comes Dowd's way, and some of Krugman's enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn't mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn't hold his columnists to higher standards.

I didn't give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.

The claim that Krugman has the "disturbing habit" of "shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults" is a generalization that is unsupported by a single example, as Bob Somerby and others have pointed out. But to Andrew Sullivan, professional Krugman hater, it's a "damning" argument:

MANKIW ON KRUGMAN: Almost as damning as Dan Okrent.
- 3:32:00 PM

It's just textbook. Lord, Ross and Lepper's 1979 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a classic reference on this phenomenon:

[S]ubjects supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to two purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones...

(Now, I think you can fairly object that Krugman portrays his ideological opponents in cartoonish ways. But the same applies to Sullivan, and Okrent's use of numbers criticism is just an assertion without supporting evidence. We're talking about a John Bates Clark medal winner here. Krugman does make mistakes, but most of the blogger criticisms of him that I've looked into range from unconvincing to downright dishonest.)

I've written before about how the alternative minimum tax needs to be fixed before it explodes into the middle class at the end of the decade -- a nasty problem that the Bush administration has used to keep deficit projections down. Surprisingly enough, the administration has insisted that any fixes be "revenue-neutral"; ie lost revenue from AMT modifications has to be made up with other tax increases. So why are Ron Wyden and Max Baucus to the administration's right on this issue? Yesterday's New York Times reports that they are endorsing Chuck Grassley's bill proposing AMT repeal with no effort to seek the revenue elsewhere -- a short-sighted decision that could lead to even more red ink by the end of the decade:

A top Senate Republican challenged a crucial element of President Bush's budget and tax strategy on Monday, calling for a repeal of the alternative minimum tax at a cost of at least $611 billion over 10 years.

...Robert J. Carroll, the Treasury Department's deputy assistant secretary for tax policy, told the subcommittee that any reductions on the alternative tax should be "revenue neutral."

...Mr. Grassley said he would introduce a bill this week to repeal the tax. The bill's co-sponsors are Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona; Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana; and Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

The New York Times reports that Google Print for Libraries is being challenged by the American Association of University Presses:

How long is a snippet? That is one
of more than a dozen questions directed
at Google Inc. this week by the
executive director of the Association
of American University Presses, the
trade group representing university
presses. At issue is whether Google
Print for Libraries, the company's
plan to digitize the collections of
some of the country's major university
libraries, infringes the copyrights
of the authors of many books
in those collections. The program
will allow users to search the contents
of books, displaying context-specific
"snippets" of the texts of
copyrighted works.

In a letter to Google
dated Friday, the details of which
were first reported by BusinessWeek
on Monday, Peter Givler, executive
director of the press association, said
that Google Print for Libraries "appears
to involve systematic infringement
of copyright on a massive
scale." Mr. Givler said the service
has "the potential for serious financial
damage" to the members of the
press association, a collection of
largely not-for-profit businesses that
typically produce and sell scholarly
works of nonfiction that have relatively
little commercial potential. In
a statement, Google said that it has
an "active dialogue with all of our
publishing partners," adding that it
protects the copyright holders by allowing
users of Google Print to view
only a few short sentences of protected
text.

Both sides seem to be screwing up here. Google owes the university publishers the same respect it has shown to commercial houses; trying to do this without their cooperation is crazy. At the same time, though, university presses put out thousands of volumes that no one reads. The sales numbers I've heard for good academic books are tiny; I can't imagine what happens to the bad ones. That's why I think making volumes accessible to search is a fantastic way to increase sales -- if it's done right.

The Monday night agreement to avert a showdown vote over judicial filibusters not only spared the Senate from a potentially ruinous clash, but also certified John McCain as the real leader of that body.

In contrast to Majority Leader Bill Frist, who was unable to negotiate a compromise with Minority Leader Harry Reid or hold his Republicans in line to clear the way for all of President Bush's nominees to be confirmed, McCain looks like the man who achieved his objectives.

If -- as many expect -- McCain and Frist find themselves rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, the gap in their performance will be remembered.

Um, no. No one gives a shit. While I certainly won't deny that the filibuster fight and the judges it's about are important, the people in this country don't give a shit and won't remember the fact the John "The Press Swoons at My Every Move" McCain was one of 14 senators who brokered a deal on this issue because most people in the country don't give a shit about this issue and more importantly most people in this country don't think bipartisanship and dealmaking for their own sakes are important.

It just isn't the case that there are two sides two every issue, there are courageous people who can forge a compromise if they want, and that compromise is intrinsically better than the original two positions.

Also, it's absurd to call McCain the "real leader" of the Senate. He's a backbencher who helped broker a paper agreement that has yet to be tested.

May 24, 2005

At a White House press briefing Monday, Press Secretary Scott McClellan, pressed by reporters and with Afghan President Karzai in disagreement, retreated on claims that Newsweek's retracted story on Koran abuse cost lives in Afghanistan.

He also claimed that he had never said it did, even though a check of transcripts disputes that. On May 16, for example, he said, "people have lost their lives." On May 17, he said, "People did lose their lives," and, "People lost their lives" due to the Newsweek report.

And let's not forget Larry DiRita, the Pentagon spokesman who told Newsweek, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch [the Newsweek source] said. How could he be credible now?"

I don't have much to add on last night's agreement to avert the nuclear option, except to say that the fate of specific nominees is a minor concern compared with the larger issue -- preventing the GOP from breaking the rules of the Senate on a party-line majority vote. Can the agreement hold back the forces of partisanship for long? I'm skeptical.

UNC political scientist Jim Stimson is the most distinguished analyst of public opinion in the country, and he's written a wonderful new book for a general audience called Tides of Consent. The stereotype is that public opinion is transient and easily manipulated, but Stimson shows that its movements over time are systematic responses to the actions of government. For instance, public opinion trends against the administration in office; thus, during the Reagan/Bush era the public became more liberal, but after Bill Clinton took office, it turned in a conservative direction. These trends in "policy mood" are, as he puts it, "the drive wheel" of American politics, powerfully shaping election and policy outcomes. In short, everything you think you know about public opinion is (probably) wrong. Make sure to check it out.

Steve Lovelady at CJR Daily reports on an Annenberg Public Policy Center poll showing the public is much more sympathetic to partisan journalism than the press is:

The Annenberg poll found that the public is far more sympathetic to the idea of a partisan press than journalists are. Whereas only 16 percent of the journalists polled said it was "a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news," 43 percent of the public thought it sounded like a swell idea.

Among the journalists, 80 percent thought a partisan press was a "bad thing," but only 53 percent of the public thought so. Four percent of each group had no opinion.

This is the same point that we made in the conclusion to All the President's Spin. As we wrote, "we need a press corps that is willing to clarify complex issues for readers, weigh in on the merits of factual claims, and hold politicians accountable" -- and the "objective" media generally refuses to do so. In some cases, non-"objective" publications do a better job. The problem is that most ideological writing is untrustworthy. We need more reporters who fill what we call the "middle ground of reporters who uphold professional standards of accuracy but call politicians to account for misleading statements." Hopefully that's where the press is headed.

May 20, 2005

Senators love to talk about their chamber as the "world's greatest deliberative body."

Yesterday morning, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) used the phrase. Yesterday afternoon, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) used it. But it took Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to show why the Senate is the world's greatest deliberative body.

The octogenarian legislator, rising in defense of the filibuster, displayed a larger-than-life poster of Ian McDiarmid playing the evil Supreme Chancellor Palpatine in the just-released film "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith."

"In a far-off universe, in this film, the leader of the Senate breaks the rules to give himself and his supporters more power," Lautenberg inveighed. "I sincerely hope that it doesn't mirror actions being contemplated in the Senate of the United States."

Lautenberg juxtaposed the evil chancellor with another poster, of Jimmy Stewart playing Sen. Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." That film, Lautenberg said, "is a celebration of this Senate, the world's greatest deliberative body. But if the majority leader is successful in ending the filibuster . . . we will move from the world's greatest deliberative body to a rubber-stamp factory."

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people might have considered such a display on the Senate floor to be cheap. But in the debate over President Bush's judicial nominees, which won't end until Tuesday at the earliest, anything worth saying on either side has long ago been said -- repeatedly.

...[I]t was hard to top Lautenberg, whose staff announced, in a media advisory, that the senator "will have visual aids to make his point -- great for television!" After Lautenberg, echoing a new MoveOn.org advertising campaign, likened Republican leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) to Palpatine, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), on a visit to the Senate press gallery, was asked what character Democrats represent. "We are the Jedi knights," he replied instantly. "We have the light source."

Frist spokesman Bob Stevenson scoffed at these claims, suggesting the Democrats are in fact led by a floppy-eared outcast from Naboo. If Frist is Palpatine and Democrats are Jedi, Stevenson wondered, "would that make Howard Dean Jar Jar Binks?"

The New York Times interactive class graphic dumps political scientists into the category "Miscellaneous social scientists," while economists and sociologists have their own categories. Where's the love?

Courtesy of my fellow Duke grad student Gerry DiGiusto, perhaps the greatest angry paragraph in the history of movie reviewing:

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in Gremlins when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink -- squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose," he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you'd leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we're here, what's with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. "I hope right you are." Break me a fucking give.

By the way, the movie isn't very good. Once you've seen it, I highly recommend the whole Lane review. This paragraph sums things up pretty well:

The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

Santorum said the suggestion that Republicans were trying to break the rules was "remarkable hubris."

"The audacity of some members to stand up and say 'How dare you break this rule' -- it's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying 'I'm in Paris, how dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city. It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement, and it has been abused."

In early March, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W. Va., linked the threat by Republicans to use the majority to bar judicial filibusters to the Nazi's use of majority power to push through their agenda in the 1930s.

Santorum called on Byrd to retract his remarks at that time, stating that the words lessened "the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate" and that he should ask for pardon.

Santorum issued his own clarification yesterday evening, stating that the reference to Hitler was "meant to dramatize the principle of an argument, not to characterize my Democratic colleagues."

"My point was that it is preposterous for someone to trample a well-established principle, and then accuse his opponents of acting unlawfully when they try to reestablish that principle," Santorum said. "Nevertheless, it was a mistake and I meant no offense."

You can see Quicktime video of the speech here. And it's worth noting that the Allies didn't bomb Paris, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out.

May 19, 2005

I want to briefly address the Newsweek Koran-flushing controversy. First, a review. The story was a disaster from a journalistic perspective. We still don'tknow whether a military interrogator actually flushed a Koran down a toilet or not -- only that such an incident will not be described in a forthcoming military report. Nor do we know whether the Newsweek story actually triggered deadly rioting in Afghanistan, a claim that was widely reported in the media even though it was contradicted by the chair of the Joint Chiefs.

In the end, journalists must do better. But the Bush administration's continuing effort to use these mistakes to delegitimize the press as a political institution is even more troubling, as Jacob Weisberg notes:

[T]he problem with the Bush administration excoriating Newsweek's insensitivity to Islam isn't just hypocrisy. There's a larger issue of bad faith and an underlying lack of appreciation for the necessary role of a free and independent press. With increasing forcefulness, Bush has tried to undermine the legitimacy of the media, or at least that subculture within it that shows any tendency to challenge him. When the Bushies say there ought to be more of a check on the Fourth Estate, they aren't really asking for more care and accuracy on the part of journalists. They're expressing frustration that they still have to put up with criticism at all.

The administration makes little secret of its disdain for the press, going so far as to openly question the legitimacy of the media's role in American politics. As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New Yorker, "They don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election... I don't believe [the press has] a check-and-balance function." Rather than viewing journalists as performing a public service, the White House sees them as a hostile force chasing the next headline regardless of fairness or accuracy.

This viewpoint guides the administration's approach to relations with the media... George W. Bush's disdain for the press goes further than any president since Richard Nixon. By denying the need for democratic accountability in word and deed, the White House has subverted the notion that the government should have to answer for its actions and statements through any mechanism other than the ballot box.

Just as they did with the CBS National Guard memo story, the White House is using the Newsweek item to try to discredit all critical press reporting. And that is dangerous in a democracy.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank on the restraint and decorum displayed yesterday in the "World's Greatest Deliberative Body":

The Senate chaplain started yesterday's judicial showdown with a prayer for "patience and peace" and "unity where there is division." Thirty-three minutes later, the majority leader just about accused the minority of attempted murder.

The Republican leader, Bill Frist (Tenn.), was asked why he, the head of the anti-filibuster movement, had voted to uphold the filibuster of a judge in 2000. Frist at first stammered -- "Mr. President, the, in response, the Paez nomination, we'll come back and discuss it" -- and then settled on an answer: "It's not the cloture votes, per se," he said, using the term for filibuster-breaking votes. "It's the partisan leadership-led use of cloture to kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees."

The Democratic whip, Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), later walked into the chamber with a transcript of Frist's accusation. "Those words should be taken from the record," he demanded. They were not.

...One can only imagine how the Founders would have viewed yesterday's events. While Frist spoke of killers, Kennedy spoke of "tyranny" and Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) spoke of "dictatorship." Republicans displayed a large portrait of Owen in the chamber that made it look as though she were a missing person. And Reid, in his excitement, briefly accused the vice president of a dalliance. Dick Cheney is a "great paramour" of virtue, Reid said, before correcting himself to say "paragon."

David Brooks foreshadows his life as a circus animal in 2001's Bobos in Paradise:

If our intellectual is successful, she will be offered a column. This seems like the pinnacle, but while a dozen people get riches and fame from column writing, thousands do it in wretched slavery -- compelled like circus animals to be entertaining once or twice a week. The ones who succeed in that line of work have a superb knowledge of one thing: their own minds. They know what they think and they have immense confidence in their judgments. This is not as simple as it sounds, for most people don't become aware of their own opinions until someone else has put them into words. But a columnist can read an article on brain surgery for 20 minutes and then go off and give a lecture to a conference of brain surgeons on what is wrong with their profession.

May 18, 2005

Dan Drezner's post reminds me to plug Robert Pape's op-ed in today's New York Times. It's always good -- and all too rare -- to see political scientists contributing to the national debate. Here's the key graf:

Over the past two years, I have compiled a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. This includes every episode in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while trying to kill others, but excludes attacks authorized by a national government (like those by North Korean agents against South Korea). The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think.

Via Andrew Sullivan and Tapped, here's Norm Ornstein (PhD in political science) with the best explanation I've seen of what's wrong with the nuclear option from a parliamentary rules standpoint (see also Josh Marshall). I don't buy all the silly arguments about the end of dissent that I've been mocking for weeks. But the way that Republicans are going to break the Senate's rules in order to change the rules -- which I hadn't fully understood before -- is deeply troubling:

Let us put aside for now the puerile arguments over whether judicial filibusters are unprecedented: They clearly, flatly, are not. Instead, let's look at the means used to achieve the goal of altering Senate procedures to block filibusters on judicial nominations.

Without getting into the parliamentary minutiae--the options are dizzying, including whether points of order are "nested"--one reality is clear. To get to a point where the Senate decides by majority that judicial filibusters are dilatory and/or unconstitutional, the Senate will have to do something it has never done before.

Richard Beth of the Congressional Research Service, in a detailed report on the options for changing Senate procedures, refers to it with typical understatement as 'an extraordinary proceeding at variance with established procedure.'"

To make this happen, the Senate will have to get around the clear rules and precedents, set and regularly reaffirmed over 200 years, that allow debate on questions of constitutional interpretation--debate which itself can be filibustered. It will have to do this in a peremptory fashion, ignoring or overruling the Parliamentarian. And it will establish, beyond question, a new precedent. Namely, that whatever the Senate rules say--regardless of the view held since the Senate's beginnings that it is a continuing body with continuing rules and precedents--they can be ignored or reversed at any given moment on the whim of the current majority.

There have been times in the past when Senate leaders and presidents have been frustrated by inaction in the Senate and have contemplated action like this. Each time, the leaders and presidents drew back from the precipice. They knew that the short-term gain of breaking minority obstruction would come at the price of enormous long-term damage--turning a deliberative process into something akin to government by the Queen of Hearts in "Alice in Wonderland."

...By invoking their self-described nuclear option without changing the rules, a Senate majority will effectively erase them. A new precedent will be in order--one making it easy and tempting to erase future filibusters on executive nominations and bills. Make no mistake about that.

The precedent set--a majority ignoring its own rules to override longstanding practice in one area--would almost inexorably make the Senate a mirror image of the House, moving the American system several steps closer to a plebiscitary model of government, and the Senate closer to the unfortunate House model of a cesspool of partisan rancor.

In this sense, the way that Republicans are threatening to cut off debate on judicial filibusters threatens to fundamentally alter the nature of the Senate. Regardless of the merits of judicial filibusters or a more general shift toward House-style rules, the larger point is that a change of this magnitude should not be made on a party-line vote than violates the Senate's own procedures.

A few days ago, Howard Dean called Tom DeLay a criminal even though no charges have even been filed. And he's not backing down:

Howard Dean, national chairman of the Democratic Party, said Tuesday that he thinks House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has committed crimes that could put the Republican in jail.

..."There's corruption at the highest level of the Republican Party, and they're going to have to face up to that one of these days, because the law is closing in on Tom DeLay," Dean said in a telephone interview before heading to an appearance today in Phoenix.

"I think he's guilty . . . of taking trips paid for by lobbyists, and of campaign-finance violations during his manipulation of the Texas election process," Dean said.

But as DeLay's staffer pointed out, Dean took a different tack when the subject was Osama Bin Laden:

Dan Allen, a spokesman for DeLay, pointed to Dean's comments about due process for bin Laden.

"I've resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found," Dean said during the 2004 Democratic primary campaign. "I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials."

Fill in the demagogic attack ad here. And when it happens, Dean has no one to blame but himself. Refusing to prejudge Osama bin Laden but calling Tom DeLay a criminal is ridiculous.

Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds attacks the ongoing New York Times series on inequality:

To deny progress, the Times series claims that "for most workers, the only time in the last three decades when the rise in hourly pay beat inflation was during the speculative bubble of the 90's." Could anyone really believe most workers have rarely had a real raise in three decades? Real income per household member rose to $22,966 in 2003 from $16,420 in 1983 (in 2003 dollars)--a 40% gain.

This is an obviously bogus argument. Given the well-documented surge in income for those at the top of the income distribution, real income per household member (a mean in the statistical sense) would go up dramatically even if everyone else's wages were stagnant. In addition, real income per household member will necessarily increase as more women enter the workforce. Finally, Reynolds is comparing apples and oranges -- the sentence he criticizes says workers didn't gain much relative to inflation before the 1990s, then he uses 1983-2003 data, which includes the 1990s, to claim that the Times is wrong.

And if we look at the data, we find that the Times statement is, in fact, correct. Consider this table (PDF) from the Economic Policy Institute, which lists the inflation-adjusted salaries of workers in the 10th, 20th, etc. percentile of the wage distribution from 1973-2003. And, sure enough, the distribution of workers' wages was largely stagnant from 1973 to 1989 before rising during the 1990s. So what is Alan Reynolds talking about? Does he even know these data exist?

(Note: When speaking about wage or income distribution data, it's important to distinguish between the changing distribution of wages/incomes and changes in wages/income over workers' lifetimes. The Times is clearly talking about the former, and while it's possible that Reynolds means to refer to the latter, the real income per household member statistic that he uses seems to indicate that he's talking about changes in the distribution.)

Harvey Rosen, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today that "Policy makers now need to ... take the much bigger step of permanently fixing Social Security's funding imbalance." So why does the President's plan close only 30 percent of the program's 75-year deficit? Call me crazy, but that doesn't exactly fix the imbalance.

May 17, 2005

An email opens up a new topic: "The United States has been the world's greatest inspiration to freedom-lovers and young democracy movements for over 200 years. So why is it that worldwide -- including now in Iraq -- new democracies overwhelmingly choose the parliamentary form of government, rather than our federalist model? Is it because other nations (particularly smaller ones) don't have the same rigid patchwork of semi-independent states we have? Or does it have to do with placating ethnic/sectarian concerns by giving them a chance to be part of a governing coalition? Still, the latter concern doesn't seem like it would be a factor in, say, Israel.

"I have wondered this before, but I thought of it again with today's news that Iraq has finally formed its new government. If they had followed the American model, they would have had their government in place by mid-February. The parliamentary form of government is certainly more responsive to the electorate, but its inherent instability would seem to make it a poor choice in a place like Iraq where a stronger executive branch could deal more effectively with law and order and keep things on a more consistent and even keel.

"Federalism has been adopted in many successful ongoing constitutional democracies, including Canada, Australia, Germany, India, and Spain.

"What hasn't been adopted successfully is presidentialism. This is [a result of] both path dependence and selection effects.

"1a. Path dependence: Britain is parliamentary, and lots of the constitutional democracies in the world are former British colonies. Strong royal governors who existed in the 13 colonies in 1776 (standing in for a still-strong Crown at home), and strong republican governors filled their shoes, with a strong independent president following later. But by the time Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, etc., framed their governments, their local administration and the Westminster system in London were parliamentary.

"1b. Path dependence: The [West] German Basic Law has been more influential and more widely-copied in the postwar world than has the US Constitution. And the fact that the U.S. planted parliamentary systems in Germany and Japan probably helped to kill off the thought that even the U.S. thought a separately elected strong president was necessary for constitutional democracies.

"2. Selection effects. Lots of countries have *tried* independently elected strong presidents. And they haven't tended to remain constitutional democracies under that system. The U.S. political culture and underlying political conditions are very robustly republican-democratic-liberal; we could get a lot of institutional things wrong and still end up with a constitutional democracy. But where those things are more fragile, presidents seem to tend to become strongmen and dictators. Presidentialism has been a terrible failure in Latin America when it's been tried-- and it often was, in the 19th century, when the new Latin American republics took on the U.S. Constituion as a model.

"I'm sentimentally attached to presidentialism, and I theoretically like the stronger separation of powers you get with an independently elected executive. But the evidence suggests that the U.S. is unusual in being able to tolerate presidentialism and remain a democracy, and that parliamentarism is much the better bet for new constitutional democracies.

Edmund Andrews documents some classic White House goalpost-shifting and tricks with numbers in the NYT:

While Mr. Bush has alluded only vaguely to the idea [of "progressive indexing"], White House officials have promoted it in considerable detail. According to one White House chart, people at every income level appear to end up winners.

Middle-income workers, for example, those with average annual earnings of $36,000 today, would receive about $1,380 a month in today's dollars - about $172 more than today's system could afford to pay - if they retired in 2050.

Even high-income workers, whose benefits would be trimmed the most, would end up with $1,626 a month, about $100 more than today's system could afford. "All earnings groups in 2050 would receive higher benefits than the current program can afford to pay," the White House declared in a briefing paper.

But as Mr. Bush's critics quickly pointed out, the happy outlook omitted two major points. The first is that, under Mr. Bush's cuts, Social Security would still not be able to afford all the benefits being promised. The second is that the comparisons look favorable only for people who retire within a few years of 2050.

Using projections by the Social Security trustees, White House officials based their comparison on the assumption that, if nothing changed, the Social Security trust fund would be out of reserves in 2041. At that point, Social Security would be allowed to pay out only as much as it took in through payroll taxes and would have to cut total benefits by about 27 percent.

The problem is that Mr. Bush's plan would not keep Social Security from running out of money. An apples-to-apples comparison would have to take into account that the government would eventually need to cut benefits or raise taxes even if the government did adopt progressive price indexing.

White House officials contend that the changes Mr. Bush has outlined would close about 70 percent of the long-term deficit, but most analysts say the changes would eliminate less than 60 percent...

White House officials do not dispute those estimates, but they have redefined the problem. Instead of saying they would solve 70 percent of the 75-year deficit, the measure most analysts use, administration officials say the plan would reduce about 70 percent of the deficit in the 75th year of their plan. The difference is worth about $500 billion over 75 years.

"The real question is how close you are to getting the system back to positive cash flow by the final year," said Andrew G. Biggs, deputy director of Mr. Bush's National Economic Council. "How much of the final-year deficit does it eliminate? By that measure the plan closes about 70 percent of the deficit."

The White House also shined up its estimates by comparing benefits for a single year, 2050. If the trust fund became insolvent as projected, benefits for a middle-income worker in 2050 would be only $1,208 a month. Benefits under Mr. Bush's plan would be $1,380, or $1,532 if the person had a personal account that earned higher returns.

But the comparison is misleading. Mr. Bush's cuts would begin in 2012, whereas people would be claiming full benefits through 2040 if there were no changes in Social Security.

Has anyone noticed that the debate among fans of the old and new Star Wars trilogies mirrors the debate over the old and new Simpsons almost perfectly? Here's USA Today on Star Wars - check out the parallels:

When Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith hits screens next Thursday, fans of George Lucas' six-part opus will again clash over which films rule: the original hits of the 1970s and '80s or the prequel that began six years ago.

Conventional wisdom has the original films -- 1977's A New Hope, 1980's The Empire Strikes Back and 1983's The Return of the Jedi -- winning hands down.

Fans of the early movies tout the breakthrough technology, the story lines and the birth of such unforgettable characters as Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Yoda and the suave Han Solo. (Related story: Compare Anakin and Luke)

"There is no personality in the new movies," says Michael Walker, a 39-year-old Star Wars devotee from Decatur, Ala. "The new movies, it seems that they are trying to win you over with fantastic special effects."

But fans younger than 25 -- many of whom had their first Star Wars theater experience with 1999's The Phantom Menace or 2002's Attack of the Clones -- have a different perspective. They find the old films slow, the dialogue corny and the special effects crude.

"I watched the originals to learn the whole story, but I couldn't watch them more than once," says Jean Burton, a 22-year-old Los Angeles retail sales employee. "I like the worlds in the new Star Wars."

The dispute can get downright testy. Yale Tindell, 28, a Baltimore automotive service manager, says "These new ones are an abomination. They have weak actors, weak stories, weak effects. They've bled the originals for profit."

Of course, my generation is right that the new Star Wars and Simpsons are terrible. I can't believe they found people who would even compare Episode I and II to the original trilogy -- that's sacrilege. (I am hopeful, though, that Episode III will be better than I and II. It would be hard to be worse.)

By the way, the capper to the article is a set of comparisons between aspects of the two trilogies -- check out the reasoning they use to claim that Jar-Jar Binks is better than the Ewoks:

The winner: Jar Jar, by a nose. Sure, half the film galaxy loathes him, but he's the third-most-popular toy, behind Yoda and R2-D2, according to Lucasfilm.

The American Political Science Association, through action by its Council and its Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights, and Freedoms, supports the views expressed in the May 3, 2005 statement by the AAUP against academic boycotts. We join in condemning the resolutions of the AUT that damage academic freedom and we call for their repeal.

Goddamn right. As Eric Alterman points out, even the Middle East Studies Association -- no one's idea of a pro-Israeli body -- has rejected the AUT action as contrary to academic freedom and open debate. Let's hope all the other disciplinary associations quickly follow suit.

Because of a transcription error, an article last Sunday in Summer Movies, Part 2 of this section, about the director Don Roos rendered a word incorrectly in his comment about the use of onscreen titles in his film "Happy Endings." He said, "I love foreign films, which have a lot of signage in them" - not "porno films."

Tom McMahon, DNC executive director, sent out yet another email full of nuclear option agitprop today:

Reports say that this week the fringe Republican leadership plans to make its final move in the battle over judicial nominees -- they will change the rules to crush dissent in the Senate and throw out the principle of a fair and independent judiciary.

Repeat after me: it will not "crush dissent" and it will not "throw out the principle of a fair and independent judiciary." Senators will have the right to dissent all they want; they just won't have the right to use the 60-vote cloture requirement to block judicial nominees. Those aren't the same thing. Nor does it follow that approving judicial nominees with a majority vote means that the judiciary isn't independent anymore.

The intellectual hooligans at the Center for American Progress are up to old tricks. Here's how they present President Bush's Social Security plan in today's edition of their Progress Report newsletter:

LEG ONE – SOCIAL SECURITY: The first leg of retirement security is Social Security. President Bush's new plan to privatize Social Security will mean a benefits cut for many Americans. (No wonder so many Americans are against his plan.) Under the Bush plan, millions of American workers will see their Social Security checks shrink dramatically. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, under Bush's plan, by 2055, Social Security benefits for medium earners "would drop 66 percent, or two thirds, compared to the current benefit structure." Instead of seeing $1,844 a month, someone making $36,600 a year would receive a mere $626. The cut is even higher for middle-class Americans making a little more: under the Bush plan, workers making $59,000 today will see their Social Security benefits slashed by 87 percent in 2055. That means instead of a monthly Social Security check of $2,441, their benefit would be just over $300. (Here are more details on how the president's plan will hit American workers.)

They quote the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, linking to this paper to support their claim that benefits would drop 66 percent for medium earners and 87 percent for a worker who makes $59,000. But they never make clear that these figures refer only to cuts in the defined Social Security benefit for workers who opt in to private accounts. Those workers would also receive benefits from their private accounts. Look at how much clearer CBPP is about what the statistics represent:

Once again, CAP is carefully following the White House playbook: say things that aren't quite false, but are deeply misleading.

May 15, 2005

Here's the DNC chairman displaying some of his trademark subtlety and discretion:

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Party, said yesterday that the US House majority leader, Tom DeLay, ''ought to go back to Houston where he can serve his jail sentence," referring to allegations of unethical conduct against the Republican leader.

Dean's remark, in a speech to Massachusetts Democrats at their party convention, drew an immediate rebuke from US Representative Barney Frank, the Newton Democrat and one of DeLay's harshest critics. ''That's just wrong," Frank said in an interview on the convention floor. ''I think Howard Dean was out of line talking about DeLay. The man has not been indicted. I don't like him, I disagree with some of what he does, but I don't think you, in a political speech, talk about a man as a criminal or his jail sentence."

When Barney Frank says you're being too partisan, you've clearly crossed the line. Let's all stop and thank the Iowa caucusgoers who kept this man far away from the presidency.

First, there's the noose he hung from a tree in his law office, which suggests an approving attitude toward lynchings. In 2000, Allen and his Senate campaign manager disavowed any racial connotation, describing the noose as part of a collection of Western memorabilia that represented his law-and-order stance on criminal justice. Then, in February of this year, he tried to claim that it was "more of a lasso" and "has nothing to do with lynching." But reports on the matter that I have read all describe it as a noose, and Allen and his representatives appeared to refer to it as such all the way through 2004. And of course, if the noose "has nothing to do with lynching," why was it hung from a tree? The symbolism seems obvious. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it in 2000, the noose was "a reminder that [Allen] saw some justification in frontier justice." Official hangings carried out under the auspices of the law presumably used real gallows, not trees.

Allen also used to display a Confederate flag at his house, which he claims was part of a flag collection.

That's all my initial post covered. But sadly, there's much more to the story.

A March 2005 report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that, "as governor of Virginia, [Allen] signed a 'Confederate Heritage Month' proclamation while dubbing the NAACP an 'extremist group.'" Here's how the Washington Post described his actions in an article last year:

[I]n the late 1990s, former governor George Allen (R) issued a Confederate History Month proclamation, calling the Civil War "a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights." It was observed during April, the month in which the Civil War essentially began with the Confederates' attack on Fort Sumter, S.C., and ended with the Army of Northern Virginia's surrender at Appomattox. The declaration made no mention of slavery, angering many civil rights groups.

Allen also opposed the 1991 Civil Rights Act in Congress, and as a state delegate he opposed creating a holiday for Martin Luther King and voted against changing the racially offensive state song (though as governor he later signed legislation dropping the song).

Given all this, it's not surprising that Allen initially defended Trent Lott when he came under fire in 2002 for comments praising Strom Thurmond's presidential candidacy. Initially, Allen called Lott a "decent, honorable man" and said that it is "unacceptable to use the issue of race as a political weapon and try to pin the sins of the past on the leaders of the present." But when Lott's comments provoked a national outcry, Allen reversed field, saying that the "comment was offensive to many Americans, particularly those who have been personally touched by the viciousness of segregation." And after Lott resigned, he added, "This is a day that the United States Senate, with Trent Lott's resignation, has buried, graveyard-dead-and-gone, the days of discrimination and segregation," with an obvious eye toward leaving aside questions about his own past.

Ever since then, Allen has been trying desperately to clean up his record. Last year, he traveled with Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a civil rights pioneer, to the bridge in Selma where Lewis and other protestors were beaten, and in February of this year he introduced a resolution apologizing for the Senate's role in preventing the passage of anti-lynching legislation.

I certainly believe in redemption, but this strikes me as too little, too late. Allen's pattern of offensive actions and racial insensitivity will make it impossible for him to be a president who represents every American.

Update 5/16: Despite reader claims to the contrary, I'm not saying Allen is a racist -- I have no way of knowing what his private thoughts are. I can only judge him on his public actions and statements, and that record is troubling at best.

The personal lives of journalists are none of my business -- except when they involve the public figures whom the journalists cover. A case in point is NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who frequently comments on matters involving the Federal Reserve without disclosing that her husband is Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. It's inappropriate.

So I was dismayed to discover today that Ron Brownstein, one of the best political journalists in the business, just got married to Eileen McMenamin, John McCain's communications director. According to the Times blurb and a report by the Washington Post's Al Kamen, McMenamin left CNN to take the job in February.

Here's the problem -- Brownstein wrote a column on April 25 that unrealistically touted McCain as a third party presidential candidate:

[I]f the two parties continue on their current trajectories, the backdrop for the 2008 election could be massive federal budget deficits, gridlock on problems like controlling healthcare costs, furious fights over ethics and poisonous clashes over social issues and Supreme Court appointments. A lackluster economy that's squeezing the middle-class seems a reasonable possibility too.

In such an environment, imagine the options available to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) if he doesn't win the 2008 Republican nomination, and former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, now that he's dropped his flirtation with running for mayor of New York. If the two Vietnam veterans joined for an all-maverick independent ticket, they might inspire a gold rush of online support — and make the two national parties the latest example of the Internet's ability to threaten seemingly impregnable institutions.

No disclosure of Brownstein's personal relationship with McMenamin appears in the online version of the article -- why? Isn't this an obvious conflict of interest that readers deserve to know about?

May 14, 2005

Members of the inner circle of high-ranking House Republicans privately agree that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is an absolute lock for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and will not be easy to defeat in the general election.

The same lawmakers believe the Republican race to oppose Clinton is wide open but regard Sen. George Allen of Virginia as having the edge over Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee. The consensus among them is that Allen is a better candidate than Frist and will the advantage over him in GOP primaries. The House members see little or no prospect for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. John McCain of Arizona or Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

The Clinton-vs.-Allen forecast by the leading House members duplicates the National Journal's poll of insiders from both parties.

First of all, calling Hillary an "absolute lock" is crazy. It's not even clear that she's running for president -- if she is, then why is she running for re-election in New York where she may get trapped into pledging not to run for president? Also, party elites and primary voters are far too strategic to back her without a good long look at John Edwards (who is vastly more electable than her) and John Kerry (who is not). Otherwise Democrats would be cursing Howard Dean right now instead of Kerry. And there's no reason to think she'd be a particularly formidable candidate -- her 2000 victory in New York is overhyped and almost half the public sees her, accurately, as a liberal. That doesn't mean she couldn't win in a bad economy, but "formidable" is ridiculous.

That said, the GOP is in trouble if George Allen and Bill Frist are the best candidates they can offer who could run the primary gauntlet. Frist is an uncharismatic stiff (remember what the press did to the last one of those from Tennessee), and running for president as a Senate leader is extremely difficult (ask Bob Dole). I guess it helps him to be a doctor, but his history of killing stray cats, his penchant for abusing his medical background, and disturbing comments like this will neutralize any advantage that he might otherwise gain. And Frist is from an exceptionally privileged background, which could hurt him in a general election against Edwards (but not Kerry).

I know less about Allen, but again, senators make lousy candidates, plus his racial history looks ugly. As I wrote in February, he's apparently in the process of trying to rewrite history:

It looks like George Allen is trying to clean up his image on race before a possible presidential run:

Senator George Allen, a Virginia Republican accused in the past of insensitivity on race issues, introduced a bill on Tuesday to apologize officially for the Senate's role in blocking antilynching legislation through decades of killings across the South.

...In his 2000 campaign to unseat Senator Charles S. Robb, Democrats and civil rights groups accused Mr. Allen of racial callousness for having displayed a noose in his law office and a Confederate flag in his home.

Mr. Allen described those as parts of collections of flags and Western memorabilia. "I had all sort of Western stuff in my office," he said, characterizing what others called a noose as "more of a lasso." He said, "It has nothing to do with lynching."

"More of a lasso"? Here's how the Richmond Times Dispatch originally reported it in 2000:

U.S. Senate candidate George Allen wears his conservative heart on the sleeve of his cowboy shirt and makes no bones about his commitment to law and order.

Visitors to his old law office near downtown Charlottesville used to see a grim and graphic reminder of his view of criminals.

Dangling from a ficus tree in the corner was a noose, a reminder that the Republican politician saw some justification in frontier justice.

And here's how Allen's own campaign manager described it in a Washington Post story during the campaign:

Christopher J. LaCivita, Allen's campaign manager, said the noose was one item in a collection of cowboy memorabilia that Allen displayed in his Charlottesville law office in the early 1990s.

Far from being a racially charged symbol, the noose was an emblem of Allen's tough stance on law-and-order issues, LaCivita said.

This defense was echoed by Allen himself according to a Virginian-Pilot report in 2000:

The noose on a tree outside his law office, he has said, symbolized his belief in strong punishment for violent criminals and was not meant to have racial overtones.

And according to the Richmond Times Dispatch, when Allen was asked about the noose again in September 2004 when he first introduced the bill, a spokesman still did not dispute what it was:

When Allen was asked after his news conference about the Confederate flag, he said he no longer displays it, and that he is a flag collector. Later, an Allen spokesman said the noose was part of an "Old West," law-and-order motif for Allen's former law office, and it had nothing to do with racial issues.

Lasso, noose, what's the difference? I can't believe Allen thinks people are this stupid.

Whatever else is wrong with his tactics, George W. Bush deserves credit for moving the GOP away from Willie Horton-style race baiting. Nominating a candidate who hangs nooses from trees and displays the Confederate flag would be a major step backward for the party and the country.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out, via James Taranto, that the Washington Post used this terrible question to measure public support for the nuclear option (last link is PDF):

Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicial nominees?

The Post didn't provide any context about the filibuster and how it requires 60 votes to be ended. Unsurprisingly, most voters said they opposed the change, a useless result that liberal groups have been touting ever since.

57% of Americans say that "Senate rules should be changed so that a vote must be taken on every person the President nominates to become a judge."

But no one is proposing that a rule requiring that a vote be taken on every person the President nominates. The rules change would require only 50 votes to end debate on nominees approved by the Judiciary Committee. Does Scott Rasmussen even understand the issue he's polling about?

Note to the news media -- with an emphasis on the cable networks: Enough is enough.

Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.

...The cable networks, which can certainly be considered centers of journalism, are also business centers with a harsh bottom line. The ratings for the cable networks are generally measured in the hundreds of thousands of viewers rather than the millions of viewers the major networks attract. Therefore, cable stations are constantly on the lookout for any story that may spike and then hold the ratings.

...I have a number of friends at the cable networks (or at least I did), and I have spoken to some about this very subject. While all professed disgust with the underreporting of missing minority women and young adults, most were very uneasy with the thought of shining a spotlight on their own management to ascertain an answer. "Besides," one of them told me, "you've already figured it out. We showcase missing, young, white, attractive women because our research shows we get more viewers. It's about beating the competition and ad dollars."

When in doubt on matters of media economics, turn to Jay Hamilton! In his book All the News That's Fit to Sell, he offers the economic concept that explains a similar phenomenon among the network newscasts -- marginal viewers:

When producers on those programs are making decisions about what stories to cover... it is the interests of younger viewers (particularly younger female viewers) that matter. Two economic concepts, advertiser value and marginal viewers, help explain this. Advertisers are often willing to pay more for viewers 18-34 or 35-49 for a variety of reasons. Their purchasing decisions may be more easily influenced, and they may be harder to reach since they watch television less often than older viewers. Since females 18-34 are particularly likely to make the purchasing decisions in their households, they are a highly valued demographic group by advertisers. This means that programmers will try to attract younger viewers to the network evening news...

Though viewers 18-34 make up 18.3% of the regular viewers of network evening television, they constitute 38.1% of the marginal viewers (i.e., those who report that they sometimes watch the programs). In the provision of news stories, programmers may often take the interests of the average viewer for granted since these (generally older) viewers are unlikely to go elsewhere. In models of product quality, it will often be the desires of the marginal consumers that producers pay attention to since those consumers are by definition making a close definition about consuming the product. This means that at the margin, network evening news producers will consider the interests of viewers 18-34 in determing what topics to cover in the news.

It's likely that the same thing is happening in cable news. Young women are the most attractive demographic group to offer to advertisers for the reasons that Hamilton explains above, and young white women are particularly valuable because their average income is significantly higher on average than that of non-whites. Unless the economics of the news business changes, it looks like we'll be seeing runaway bride stories for a long time to come.

(PS Make sure to read the full book for Hamilton's fascinating explanation of allegations of network news bias. He shows that the networks appear to directly respond to the interests of marginal viewers in making coverage decisions. In particular, their responsiveness to the interests of young women leads to more stories on issues such as gun control and education that may end up skewing liberal. And he also offers a fascinating economic explanation of the forces that drove the shift toward "objectivity" as the model for journalism.)

After an initial effort at restraining Medicare spending - squelched by President Bill Clinton's veto pen - Republicans in Congress have become almost indistinguishable from Democrats on spending. They have been aided and abetted by President Bush, who not only refuses to veto anything, but also aggressively worked to ram a $23.5 trillion (of which $18.2 trillion must be covered by the general revenue) expansion of Medicare down the throats of the few small government conservatives left in the House.

This behavior has led me and other conservatives to conclude that starving the beast simply doesn't work anymore. Deficits are no longer a barrier to greater government spending. And with the baby-boom generation aging, spending is set to explode in coming years even if no new government programs are enacted.

...[M]any conservatives continue to delude themselves that all we have to do is cut foreign aid and get rid of pork barrel projects to rein in the budget. But unless health spending is confronted head on, even the most draconian cuts in discretionary spending won't be enough to restore fiscal balance.

I am no deficit hawk. For decades I have argued that the negative effects of deficits are generally exaggerated. But unless spending is checked or revenue raised, we are facing deficits of historic proportions. It is simply unrealistic to think we can finance a 50 percent increase in spending as a share of gross domestic product - which is what is in the pipeline - just by running ever-larger deficits. Sooner or later, that bubble is going to burst and there will be overwhelming political support for deficit reduction, as there was in the 1980's and early 1990's.

When that day comes, huge tax increases are inevitable because no one has the guts to seriously cut health spending. Therefore, the only question is how will the revenue be raised: in a smart way that preserves incentives and reduces growth as little as possible, or stupidly by raising marginal tax rates and making everything bad in our tax code worse?

And from NRO:

I now believe that the best we can hope to do is make incremental improvements to the existing tax system and hopefully prevent it from getting worse. Unfortunately, because the current President Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed spending to get totally out of control, I believe that higher taxes are inevitable. In particular, the enactment of a massive new Medicare drug benefit absolutely guarantees that taxes will be sharply raised in the future even if Social Security is successfully reformed.

Too many conservatives delude themselves that all we have to do is cut foreign aid and pork-barrel spending and the budget will be balanced. But unless Republican lawmakers are willing to seriously confront Medicare, they cannot do more than nibble around the edges. With Republicans having recently added massively to that problem, and with a Republican president who won’t veto anything, I have concluded that meaningful spending control is a hopeless cause.

Therefore, we must face the reality that taxes are going to rise a lot in coming years. I believe that a VAT [value-added tax] is the least bad way of getting the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that will be needed. The alternative is higher tax rates that will be far more debilitating to economic growth.

Mickey Kaus catches Rush Limbaugh mashing together two Ken Starr soundbites to accuse CBS of distortion, when in fact it's Limbaugh who's distorting Starr's position on the nuclear option (he opposes it). As Kaus writes, "When people on the left do that, people on the right call it 'Dowdification,' no?" Well, yes, but somehow I doubt the anti-Dowd forces will jump on this one.

May 13, 2005

A preliminary Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of President Bush's proposals for Social Security shows that the combination of private accounts and progressive indexing would close only 30 percent of the 75-year actuarial deficit, move the date of trust fund exhaustion forward by 11 years, and add trillions to the national debt. Here's the key table:

Table 1: Impact on President’s Plan on
Social Security Financing and Solvency